Visceral
by Javan Ryder
Summary: At the end of the day, he's the only one who really understands. Canderous/Revan


Trying my hand at something a little different.

* * *

Canderous _knows _war.

He remembers the rawness of battle the way he remembers his homeworld; a part of him ever-present and easily called to mind by the slightest reminder, the faintest brush of something that echoes a past now behind him. He remembers the taste of smoke in the atmosphere, the heat of raging fires against his exposed flesh, the roar of battle rising to encompass all the world as the sky turns red with blood and planets collide and the world shakes like thunder beneath his feet. He remembers screams of the fallen and the cries of triumph from the triumphant, the almost-shriek of basilisk droids in the skies.

He remembers the _noise _– so much noise, a deafening roar like that of the universe twisting inward upon itself, more precious than all the wealth in the galaxy, because as long as there was noise it meant he was still _alive. _Still fighting.

He remembers victory.

Canderous's thirst for war is that of a man starved for water on Tatooine's surface, and echoes desperation and fierce desire that burns away all else. It rattles in his chest and there is always that _taste _of it when he picks up his gun, and always that trickle of reminiscence that crawls down his spine when he tightens the fastens of his armor or catches the nip of ozone left in the air by a nearby lightsaber. He became a merc because of it, after all, though that could never hope to compare; it is but a speck against the expanse of the life he's lead.

Canderous knows war, and though the war is over, he will carry it forever with him.

-N-

He meets Darra in the Undercity, where the sun does not reach and the sky is made up of metal and fractured dreams and the ground slicked with the blood of the dead.

She holsters the blaster she was using (though she was a _terrible _shot) and looks at him evenly, with eyes a bit too wide for her face, hair that is a very ordinary shade of brown falling across them. "Thanks for the help," she says, straightening up, and she's bleeding from a cut beside her eye but she doesn't seem to notice.

Canderous looks at her, coolly. "Undercity's no place for tourists," he tells her, because it isn't, and because the idea of having to save the lives of over-zealous adventurers in addition to those of the incompetent men he has to drag around as his team doesn't particularly appeal to him.

She eyes him. "Thanks. If I see any tourists, I'll pass that along."

It's a comeback as old as time and one he's heard before – but, well, at least she's got spirit. He gives a barking laugh, wiping blood spatter from his cheek with the back of one hand. "Good luck with whatever you're after. You'll need it."

She arches a brow, glancing from him to his ramshackle little team and back again. "Seems like you need it more than me, friend."

And _that _is true enough, so he slaps her jovially on the shoulder as he goes by. "You aren't bad, kid. Improve your aim with that blaster a bit and I just might invite you to join on up."

Of course, it's _her _who asks _him _to join up just a few days later, and her aim with that same blaster is just as bad but he still says yes.

-N-

They don't talk much at first – Canderous isn't one for talking and she is wary of him, and the two of them circle each other in the far reaches of the ship like predators as the days of their voyage between the rubble of Taris and the promises of Dantooine drag by. Canderous finds his place in the starboard dormitory and she holes up in the medbay, and Onasi's stark suspicion bridges the gap between the two while tension eats away at the air.

And then they run into each other about a day out from Dantooine in the kitchen set off the main room, him wiping down the rails of his blaster rifle and she on her way to get something to eat, and she looks at him with sharp edges to her expression and a slight tilt to her head and says, "Good morning."

And there is no _morning _in space, he thinks, because there is always blackness and stars and infinity, but he doesn't argue. "I don't bite," he snaps gruffly, and gestures with the rifle sharply at the chair opposite him. "Stop circling me like I'm a fracking Rancor and sit down, would you?"

Darra drops into the seat with an annoyed huff of breath, her morning serving of caf very nearly sloshing over the rim of the mug she's clutching. She looks ready to say something, but then she snaps her mouth shut and only opens it again to comment casually, "You're up early today."

"I'm always up early," he says, his voice rumbling and low, eyes flicking upwards from his work to fix on her tense expression. "So are you. Get to your real point."

She looks evenly at him. "Are you going to leave?"

And _that _is abrupt and straight-to-the-point; his lips curl back from his teeth in a grin, because he _likes _direct and this is ground upon which he can feel comfortable. "No," he says.

Direct. She looks at him with narrow eyes and a question in her stare, and she says, even and measured, "I don't know where we're headed."

"Dantooine," he tells her, sliding the various pieces of his rifle back into their place. Familiar; all of it familiar under his hands, unlike everything around him, and in that thin enclosure of familiarity is where he takes solace.

"I-…" Another sigh. "That's not what I meant."

"Then say what you mean."

She gives him a hard look, impatience and irritation and blunt edges. "You'd be willing to simply… throw your lot in with a team of people you don't know, who will end up Force-knows-where, all because you escaped with us from a planet before it was destroyed?"

He blinks. "Sure. Beats what I was doing before."

And that, as it turns out, is that.

-N-

The Jedi Enclave is a very dull place, Canderous decides, somewhere between arriving and being told by the Jedi manning the landing port that he has to leave his weapons on the ship. He complies only because there are a _lot _of Jedi around him, all armed, and it's simply not the sort of day for getting into a skirmish with the lot of them.

The war's over, after all.

So he waits around as the days pass, each the same as the previous one, things sort of just blending into a monotonous drone that blurs out the color in the sky and makes teeth itch. There is _nothing _to do and nowhere to go except for out onto the plains, and he doesn't do that only because he's not so eager for action that he'd be willing to amble out into territory infested with twisted Kath Hounds and who knew what else all by himself.

She ends up a Jedi, but it's all the same to him, and he says as much when she asks him how he feels about it.

"I _feel," _he said flatly, "that you're utilizing every weapon in your arsenal to make yourself a better combatant. If you want the mushy nonsense, go talk to Onasi."

Undeterred, she grins as though just issued a massive compliment and takes off for the other side of the ship.

"_Jedi," _Canderous mutters under his breath, and gets right back to working on upgrading his rifle in silence.

-N-

_She_ knows war.

He doesn't realize this, at first, but he's fairly sure that she didn't, either. But there comes a bleak day and a hot, dusty stretch of Tatooine's desert amidst raging Sand People and swirling dunes crawling beneath their clothing and a sky twisting blue and yellow with the rising storm, and he sees the glimpse of the person who understands that element that makes this _intoxicating. _

"Get down!" she snaps at him, and the hiss of her saber is an arc of crystal blue against crimson blood and roughened clothing, a snap of ozone layering the air and mingling with the sand. He ducks the instant she speaks, a knee-jerk reaction that saves his life when a Tusken's weapon hisses over his head. He twists and bashes the thing over the head with the butt of his rifle, hard, feeling something give way.

This is not war; it is a skirmish with stray Tusken Raiders in the middle of Tatooine's dunes on a hot day in the early clutches of a sandstorm.

But it doesn't matter. When they fight, side by side like this and even in a sandstorm and a desert and a blisteringly hot day, it _is _war.

The last Raider falls with a twisted cry and the dunes are quiet, heavy silence echoing with labored breathing and the hum of an idle saber and the protesting wind as it slithers across the sand. Canderous looks over at Darra, and Darra stands slowly and deactivates her weapon, and their eyes meet and war rages in the spaces between.

She knows war, and there is something like steel and something like resolve and something like the mournful echo of a time that once was, all of them twisted inward upon themselves as they stride onward into the sand.

-N-

There is a jungle planet.

Trees that stretch into infinity above them and shadows that drip over the eternally-dark underworld of the Wookiee planet, where the sky does not quite reach and the world is kept in stale nighttime. There is a bone-chilling cold and a night lost in echoing blackness, as they huddle around a primitive campfire and warm their hands at the licking flames.

Bastila is sleeping, and Canderous is keeping watch, a stone presence in the uncertain gloom. He remembers Dxun in this moment, remembers jungle trees and swishing rains, thunder crashing across a shadowy sky as battle rages in the spaces between night and day.

Darra picks her way through the brush to sit beside him, pulling her knees up to her chest.

"Tell me a story," she says.

He looks at her, patience and cool steel and unforgiving stone. "A story?"

"Tell me about the war," she says, and there is something like desperation and something like hunger that echoes in the dark boundaries of her voice. A razor-edged need to hear more about that war he fought in so long ago, which is now lost to memory and collecting dust in the caverns of time. She doesn't seem to mind this much.

"Alright," he says. And then: "The second battle of Dxun. Towards the end of the wars. You've heard of it?"

She nods, her eyes staring out into the jungle.

"It was a glorious battle. A preface to our destruction, as it turned out, but in and of itself a day that would go down in tales of greatness for years to come just the same. Revan made few mistakes in her campaign against us, but Dxun was one of them – and maybe it was planned this way all along, but either way, our triumph shook the very planet's core."

He continues from there in almost a daze; loses himself in the memory of raw adrenaline and pouring rain, mud beneath his heavy stride and blood mingling with sweat on his face. He tells her _everything_ he can_; _not a detail held back, as he weaves the pieces of the story together into the whole that that day was, so long ago.

There are things he _can't _tell her. How the lightning's instantaneous illumination siphoned through the thick brush to cast a silver glow upon the battle and let the rain glint like a million stars against the darkness of the trees. How _dark _it was in those spaces between the flashes of lightning, how the battle was fought in the deepest part of a jungle during the bleakest part of a storm, while thunder shook the ground beneath their feet. How the mud beneath their boots ran red, how the dawn the next morning was stained crimson in honor of the fallen.

He knows he doesn't have to. He knows the spaces in her mind that are like his will fill in what he cannot, will color between the lines and paint the picture simple words are unable to.

He knows that she'll _understand._

And when he is done she leans forward, forearms on her knees, and twists her neck to look back at him. "You miss it."

"There's no point in missing it," he retorts flatly.

"That's not an answer," she says with a wan half-smile, but doesn't press for more. The silence drags out and she gets an odd look in her eyes, and for the spark of a fleeting moment he can see the battle reflected in her stare, thunder and lightning and blood and flame, a flavor of chaos richer than life itself. But it passes and he finds that it is just the reflection of the Shadowlands and the echo of something that might have been.

They sit quietly and stare out into the darkness, side by side.

-N-

Manaan makes him twitchy; all oceans, rolling and deep and hiding secrets, and Selkath who are hiding even more.

And too many laws and people with an over-zealous desire to execute someone for him to take aim at one of the self-righteous fish and just blast its damn head off. And there it is: twitchy. He paces the confines of the ship more than he sits, snaps waspishly at Onasi or the Wookiee more than he remains in the stony quiet he is known for.

"We'll be leaving soon enough," Darra promises lightly, to which he gives her a long look of cool appraisal and comments that her idea of 'soon' is rarely equivalent to his.

But it's all the same, anyway; there are bases to be broken into and swoops to be raced, and Canderous wanders out one night to the little alcove the Selkath had made up for the merc population of Manaan. It's more his type of place, that; there is drinking and Pazaak and cigs being smoked in between, people who _aren't _fish and people who aren't Sith and Republic soldiers getting into fights like small children.

He feels right at home, so he orders a drink, settling into a chair at the curving bar and leaning back, taking in the other customers with a critical stare. Mercs, the lot of them, he notes with vague interest; people still in the clutches of what he so recently left, and people who believe they can find honor in a profession that has none, and people who have no choice.

A few more drinks take the edge off of his built-up tension, and he's just starting to relax when _she _swaggers in, all dagger-eyed and sharp edges and cool indifference, and when she plops down beside him at the bar he spares her only a jagged sidelong stare. She ignores it, ordering a Juma and giving the bartender a smile that drips pure charm.

"What are you doing here?" she asks casually, gulping her drink with a greedy earnestness, fingers pulling at the sides of the smudged tumbler as if she can disappear into it if she just tries hard enough.

"I could ask the same of you," he retorts, to which she laughs, leaning briefly against the plane of his shoulder before pulling away and ordering another drink. He's never seen her drink before, not once; she told him she didn't drink, he recalls, back on Taris – that memory is fuzzy against the backdrop of their impending doom, the echo of all they've been through since.

"What? Stay at the ship and miss out on your delightful company?" When that fails to earn a smile, she goes serious. "We got the map. Carth is entering the new coordinates in the nav now. We leave first thing in the morning."

"Morning, huh." Canderous sips his drink, chewing over the sharp bite with relish. "You didn't have to come looking for me, then."

"Maybe I wanted to," she said lightly, tilting her face up to look at him. The low lighting catches on the grin at the corner of her mouth, the glint in her even stare, the almost-quaver that twists into something that is nearly a plea behind it all.

And… well. He doesn't know how to answer that. He eyes her warily, because there is something _off _in the way she's acting, but he can't quite pin it down. So he just sticks around to make sure she doesn't pick a fight and get herself killed, and because there is something compelling about this slightly loosened version of the Jedi he knows, and because he really doesn't want to go back to the ship.

So they drink and talk, about war and about philosophy and the taste of the alcohol they wash down with stories and recollections. The night gets late and lazy music filters between hazy lighting and knocked-back drinks and the spaces between all of them. He is just Canderous and she is just Darra; not hero and follower or Mandalorian and Jedi, but just beings amidst a crowd full of them, lost somewhere between the cracks of Manaan's society and comfortable in this anonymity.

But she, as it turns out, is not so good at holding her liquor; at some point she just sort of crumples against him with a sound that might have been a groan, and he, startled, drags her to her feet as she launches into a mumbled tirade about how _tired_ she is.

"I can't do it," she snaps at him when he tries to get her to walk through the bar to the exit.

"Walk?" he inquires mildly, and she gives him a glower that has a lot of bladed edges and unspoken weariness to it.

"_No_. This. Save the…" she waves an arm vaguely, nearly knocking his drink out of his other hand. "The galaxy, or… the galaxy."

"Well, that's too bad," Canderous mutters, looping her arm around his neck to support her, and setting the glass of unfinished Juma on the countertop. "Because we don't have much of a choice."

"Why?" Her brow furrows and she leans into the alcove of his sturdy frame, and Canderous isn't one to condone weakness but he scoops her up close to him anyway and watches the streets with a bladed stare, daring anyone to so much as give his partner the edge of a wrong look.

Nobody does.

"Because we're big damn heroes," he says at last. "That's why."

"Oh," she says. "Oh, alright."

They move along in thoughtful silence after that, and after a while she murmurs into the side of his shoulder that she can walk on her own now, but that doesn't keep Canderous from sticking right to her side as they head for the ship.

-N-

"You don't have to do this, you know."

The dunes of Tatooine are sandy and wrought with an empty past, years turned to sand and ghosts carried off by the wind. Canderous looks sidelong at Darra, who watches him earnestly, eyes shaded by a hand over her brow.

"It's a question of _honor_," he tells her, tersely. "You couldn't understand."

"Fighting each other to the death?" She grunts. "Seems like a rather ridiculous way of earning that honor. One of you will be dead."

"You sound worried," Canderous observes. "Don't think I can win it, do you?"

She smiles. "If you die, I won't have anyone to drag me home from the next cantina I wander into."

And he doesn't know how to respond to _that, _but Jagi shows up at that moment anyway and the world is a blur of faded betrayals and ghosts of the past brought out to play.

-N-

And then it is over, and Jagi is dead, taken by his own blade.

'Time', Canderous had told Darra, when she'd brought him something to drink and asked him if he needed anything. He just needed time.

Ghosts of the past and long nights, playing over events long past and twisting them around in his head, wondering at the curious way their jagged edges fit together and wondering at the span of time stretching out between the days of the war and this day. Now.

He went to war in the first place for honor. So did Jagi.

He supposes that, at the end of the day, that is what this is. Their own war, a band of mismatched rebels against the steel of the galaxy and the impossible expanse of the Sith army. The code he lives by – that which constructs the very fabric of his being, that which builds the day-to-day life he leads – dictates that honor is won in a battle fought against impossible odds, with everything to lose.

As they are doing now.

He supposes he can live with that.

-N-

There is a realization.

Jagged edges of a past that was and the hazy fringes of what only pretended to be, and they get mixed up quite quickly in Canderous's head – this is Darra, their fearless leader, and this is Revan, the fearless-leader-turned-tyrant of the Republic. At some point along the way one ends and the other begins, the pieces of Darra giving way to the fragmented remains of Revan, and-…

And he stops thinking about it.

The Leviathan was very cold and dark and echoed of the eternal quiet of Malachor, and Darra is very tense and withdrawn, echoing of the legacy of Revan.

-N-

Sparring, at least, is easy to figure out.

"No Force powers," he warns curtly, to which she just nods, dropping into a ready stance and watching him with an unreadable stare from across the training mat. She's lean muscle and sturdy build, a solid fighter and a former leader, forgettable visage that once was eclipsed by the mask. This is Darra and this is Revan; he sometimes thinks he can see the break between the two, where cities burn and planets die and betrayal hisses deeply in the spaces left there.

They fight as warriors though, because that is all that matters on the training mat; she can be Darra or she can be Revan, and it doesn't really matter because if she wins it will _just _be a win.

He wins, this time.

They drop to the mat when things come crashing to a shuddering stop, with Revan panting for breath and Canderous breathing deeply to gather his strength. "Good match," she mutters stiffly, flipping over onto her stomach and pushing herself up on a bent forearm. Her breath comes ragged, uneven.

He nods shortly and sits up, stretching the soreness already settling in from his arms. He can tell something more is on her mind, today; her fighting was _off _during the match_, _with something very distinctly clicked out of place and something very distinctly missing. She's preoccupied and restless, and unspoken words hang bitterly in the gaps that span between sparse comments, red flags to highlight the underlying problem she won't just come out and voice. So he says, eventually, because he knows he'll hear about it sooner or later anyway – "Something on your mind?"

"Does it bother you?" she asks, a little too quickly. Her tone is rushed, strained, with serrated edges and a hint of raw uncertainty that is just _not like her._

He just looks at her, steely and waiting for elaboration, one arm balanced casually on his bent knee.

She sighs deeply, eyes closing for the breadth of a half moment before she relents and goes on crisply. "Me being… who I am. Does that bother you?"

"Should it?"

"Well…" She chews on her lower lip contemplatively. "I don't know. I _did _lead the force that defeated your people. It seems to bother Carth, and the Republic never even fell, so I just… I wondered. You're…" She laughs shortly. "You're a bit more difficult to read."

Canderous grunts, letting the last part by without comment. "You were the better strategist," he tells her, with authority. "We fought on even ground and you emerged the winner. You bested us, and you deserved your victory. Simple as that."

"Huh," she says. And: "Huh."

"It's an honor to be here," he tells her, evenly. "If I didn't _want _to be here, I'd have left long ago. And you, Revan, are better than this; you don't mope around about things you can do nothing to change. You win wars. You plan battles. You prove that you're the best – not by saying you are, but by _acting. _Proving it."

"I'm not Revan now," is all she says, staring at a wall with that same unreadable mask back firmly in place.

Canderous scoffs, disgusted. "Yes. You are. You can try to be the… _fabrication _the Jedi tried to build, but at the end of it all, you _are_ Revan. No amount of Jedi brainwashing can take that from you. And _because _you are Revan, I will follow you to whatever end."

"Huh," she says again. Then she stands, eyeing him with icy confidence that stands out stark against the doubt present just moments previous. "Alright. Ready for another match?"

-N-

Korriban is a dark place, even by his standards; ruins that hide a twisted past and desert sands that carry a song of the dead, a promise of a power and promise of return.

He waits in those ruins for her to emerge, a pillar of stone in the sands while the red-hued sun sinks and turns the world to flame. Onasi paces beside him, his eyes flashing bright in the gloom of the desolate wastelands, but he says nothing; tension already present before the Leviathan has only managed to triple since, and they have taken to leaving each other to curt silence and even stares.

Now, though, it's a shared concern that spans between the two of them; she's been in there since before dawn, and now in the wake of sunset Carth's worry is palpable in the increasing rigidity in his stride, and the stirrings of raw unease fester beneath Canderous's expression of chiseled stone.

Revan does, finally, step from the ruins; there is blood on her face and blood on her robes, and the haunted look in her stare is only partially hidden by an attempt to look emotionless as she shoves a datapad at Carth and mutters something about coordinates.

She already looked exhausted _before _they have to fight their way through the Sith Academy, but afterward she sort of just folds into her bed in the medbay, while Juhani tends to her injuries.

And Canderous simply waits outside, stern and silent, a stoic guardian up through the night while that backdrop of certain doom closes in around them.

-N-

The Star Forge.

She looks out into the vastness, and she is many things, Canderous decides; a Jedi and a savior, a once-villain and a destroyer of worlds, a shell of something that was and promise of something that might be. But, he decides that it doesn't really matter all that much. Mostly, she is just their only hope.

"Ready?" he asks shortly, looking at her across the spaces that echo in the Star Forge's depths, as war crashes between the skies and the world shakes at their feet like thunder.

"No," she says, and then she looks at him with a flash of daring and a whisper of muted hesitation, and with a decisive hiss of breath that cuts the air she closes the gap between them – _no more spaces and echoes of war and darkness and flame_ – and she lays her fingers along the sharp angles of his jaw and kisses him, fierce and searching and almost frantic; her hands are warm and _close _and his arms slide around her for just that moment, and then before he can react further she is back across the room again.

Her breath is a bit ragged, again.

"I'm ready now," she says brightly.

He breathes deeply and wonders at that echo of something that was and something that might be, and war is raging all around them, but he nods.

They stride on together, because that is simply how it ought to be.

-N-

She kills Malak, and he decides that he always knew she would.

After ceremonies and celebrations and reconciliations, Canderous finds her on top of the idle _Ebon Hawk, _looking out onto Lehon's rolling waves. She's sitting very still, knees pulled to her chest and chin resting atop them, a half-empty bottle of cheap alcohol clutched in her fist.

He sits down next to her.

"I don't want to talk," she tells him, shortly.

"And when have _I _ever 'wanted to talk'?" Canderous retorts, which pulls a fragment of a tired chuckle from her.

She passes him the bottle, which he obligingly takes a swallow from. It's some kind of unfamiliar ale, burning down his throat and absolutely terrible. He greedily takes another sip to wash it down.

"I can't stay," she tells him briefly, after a long time has passed in wary silence. "And I don't want loose ends abandoned here when I do leave."

"I know," Canderous answers briefly. That much is something he can hardly argue with, when the Republic is already so frail and the promises of more trials ahead are so very bleak and _there_ and not so far away as to let them take a full breath between certain dooms.

"Some things are best left to the stories," she offers, with a smile that lacks much heart tossed back in his direction. The starlight is kind to her lingering injuries, softening bruises and cuts and old scars and playing down the sharper edges to her expression.

"I agree," he says, after a pause. He hands the bottle back, pressing it into her outstretched hand. "But you know I'll do whatever you ask, Revan. All you need do is say the word."

She pauses. "Carth will keep the Republic strong. I need you to be prepared to defend it. No matter the cost." She takes another swallow from the bottle of ale, staring out at the sea. "The clans… you have to rally them again. You're the only one who can."

Canderous pauses. "That will take more than talk alone," he remarks, at length.

"I'll handle it," is all she says. "Just… promise me. Promise me, Canderous."

"You have my word," he says shortly, and she seems to find that acceptable.

The waves swish against the shore and the sky is full of stars and uncertain futures and the promise of some things not yet recognized.

-N-

In the end, she does leave, with Mandalore's mask pressed into his hands and a promise of return murmured into the darkness.

He lets her leave, because he knows he has to. He begins preparations to do what she asked, because he gave her his word. He waits for her to return, because she told him she would.

Sometimes the nights spent on Dxun are dark a

nd stormy, in thunder and lightning and swishing rain, and he imagines the clans rebuilt under his rule, so that the skies blaze again with the strength of the Mandalorians – fire and ice and blood and death, a force worthy of shaking a galaxy to its core.

And then, sometimes, when the night is clear (though this is rare) and the stars are bright, he can see the echo of a hero that was in the spaces between them – a specter of the past and a rumbling of a journey lost to time, and a whisper of something that _could have been._

He breathes in deeply and stares out, into the spaces between the stars and the echoes of darkness and light and gray, into the face of that something that _might_ have once been, but _isn't_.

And then he unites the clans.

He gave her his word, after all.

* * *

Disclaimer: I own nothing. Thanks for reading!


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